The Android lockscreen has been slowly evolving over the years, and it's got a respectable feature set these days. But sometimes rethinking a feature can provide a better overall experience. Cover is a new beta lockscreen alternative that tries to learn where you are and what you're most likely to need access to, then put it right there on the lockscreen. It's a compelling approach, but how is it?

We're not the first to observe this: plug an Android tablet into a charge (or even better, a wireless charger or dock) and it becomes a pretty splendid digital photo frame, like the one you gave your Grandma three Christmases ago that's still in the box. Cloud.TV, the developer behind the excellent HD Widgets, would like to offer you a more powerful alternative. Meet Dayframe, a connected and continuously-updating photo frame app.

Normally we're pretty pleased when we can report that a new country or carrier has enabled the option for carrier billing in the Google Play Store, allowing customers to charge app and media purchases directly to their phone bill. But for some reason, European carrier Vodafone seems to have dropped the option entirely. Vodafone has disappeared from the list of carrier billing partners on Google's Play Store support page, and we've confirmed the loss of capability from individual users in the UK, Germany, Italy, and Spain.

One of the more drool-worthy aspects of the software from the Nexus 5 (and not necessarily Android 4.4) is the homescreen and launcher, which includes a ton of new features tied directly into Google Now and Google Search. But you might want to curb your enthusiasm: according to a report from The Verge, Google isn't interested in expanding that launcher to other devices at the moment.

Google tells us that the new Launcher on the Nexus 5 is exclusive to the phone — though the company may change its mind and offer it for the Nexus 4 and perhaps even put it on the Play store someday.

There was an unusually specific leak from Samsung last month, showing a relatively accelerated schedule for updates on the Galaxy S4, S III, and Note II on all four major American carriers. That isn't much comfort for those customers on US Cellular, since the #5 carrier wasn't quite important enough to be included in the leak. But now there's a new leak in town, helpfully provided by an anonymous tipster, showing that the US Cellular Galaxy S4 will be updated on Friday the 8th.

Google has been fiddling with the way lockscreen media controls should work since Ice Cream Sandwich, and they've gotten yet another makeover in KitKat. When a supported app like Google Play Music, Netflix, or Play Movies is running in the background (Chromecast-only in the last two instances) you get a full screen display of the artwork associated with the content on the lockscreen. It offers some new functionality too.

You can still navigate around to other lockscreen widgets and the album art will still be there – it essentially takes the place of your background.

The PushBullet team has been cranking out new features for their file-synching app as of late, making it that much easier to get files from an Android device onto a PC (and back again) without having to deal with any bothersome cables or heavy cloud services. Now the team has crossed yet another milestone - they've made PushBullet more of a social experience. In the past, users could pair directly with their friends' individual devices.

When the latest version of Android starts rolling out, it's well-known that the vast majority of devices out there will never get updated. It's not the best situation, but it's one that at this point in time, many of us go into knowingly. So you LG Intuition owners out there, you already know you're not going to see KitKat come to your device, but at least you will finally now be able to leave Ice Cream Sandwich behind.

In case you haven't seen Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, the local news, or the latest rabble-rousing speech from your ineffectual Congressman, today is the yearly release of Activision's Call of Duty franchise. Kudos to the publisher: they've managed to get the Android companion app published on day one, so half the male college students in the country can spend today's lecture time customizing their multiplayer loadout.

If you've played a multiplayer shooter in the last few years, you know how this goes.